Something I didn’t mention in my post about an unprofessional moderator is that he censored an earlier version of this post. And lo and behold, one the minifier bugs I raised was actually released in 0.47 and had to be fixed in 0.47.1.

This minifier, by default, will delete your html, head, and body tags. (unless they have attributes, possibly) The author of the minifier thinks this is what he should do because those tags are described as “optional” in one of the HTML specs. They are not actually optional on the web. I shouldn’t have to go into all the things this could break, but think about all the non-browser agents consuming your HTML (he didn’t respond to this, and seems to think only browsers consume our webpages)

He also deletes IE conditional comments, which is code. If conditional comments are used in a page, it’s because the developers put them there. Deleting other people’s code is not how a minifier should work. Now I know people will say that older IE versions are irrelevant, but such comments skirt the fact that it’s not your website, and whosever website it is might have good reasons for their code. For example, a lot of pre-IE11 installs are kiosks that don’t get updated. In graduate school, our stats lab had a standard mirror with IE8 when maybe IE10 or 11 was the latest release. I would always install the latest version when using those computers, along with Firefox, but a reboot would always revert to the mirror.

The point is that people have lots of contexts that we are not privy to, and people are often forced to use public computers. They could be in an internet café in Cuzco, Peru having to use IE9 or something on some old PC. We just don’t know, and a lot of us care about figures like 2 or 3 percent of visitors. To some of us, that’s a lot of users.

In any case, a minifier should not be deleting core tags like html, head, body, some of the table tags, sometimes p tags, much less actual code like conditional comments. This is a bad minifier, and we should find a replacement.

I’m not sure what about this post would violate any policies of this forum. Therefore, I see no basis for censoring it. It’s mostly a list of facts with some opinions thrown in. Hopefully bep won’t censor it. The last time, he rewrote my title, and called it “screaming” and false, then hid it. I find his conduct wildly unprofessional and something that deserves action. The title of this post is pretty much the same as before. I don’t know how it could be described as “screaming”, and everything I’m saying about the minifier is true to the best of my knowledge. I strongly believe people would want to be warned about what this minifier does.

@JoeWeb your comments don’t make much sense to me. I have more than 2000 commits to the Hugo source code. There certainly are some bugs in some of those commits, but I take responsibility for my own mistakes and try to fix them – the 0.47.1 you bring up is a good example of that. I understand that you are one those programmers I have heard of, but never spoken to, that creates bug-free software, always. That must be really nice, but it would be good if you could show a little understanding to the rest of us not in this league.